ZealForTruth,
Yeah, it was an example brought up in one of my missions class for us to understand the imporance of how we need balanced teaching in missions.
In the example, they over-emphasized the polygamy issue, and ended up neglecting the need to take care of these women. They had outwardly converted these men to Christ in their actions, but not converted their hearts.
Now the question would be, is it better to tell a man, 'get rid of your extra wives' or 'keep your wives, but make sure that your children only have one wife or husband.'
It's about interpretting our Western church culture as correct. If you read the verses about deacons and elders in the NT, the requirement says 'a husband of but one wife.' Now this makes a strange assumption, that there are those in the church with more than one wife!
It wouldn't be a requirement if it didn't in fact separate.
Now it doesn't say, 'having more than one wife is wrong.' In fact, it may have simply been an assumption that if you have more than one wife, you have more people to feed and take care of, so you shouldn't be serving as a deacon.
But since we read that verse through the lense of our Western church cultures, we automatically assume that all it really says is men shouldn't have more than one wife.
Now I don't support polygamy in modern American culture... but there was a time and place in history where it was acceptable practice.
Even now in some parts of the world, women outnumber men 4 to 1 (namely in the middle east). And if a woman want's security and provision for her needs, she has to become a second or third wife to a man who is already married.
If we look at human history, there were many times that men were killing eachother over resources or territory, and they left their women and children to fend for themselves.
We automatically look at a man with more than one wife as if it's a sexual issue. In some cultures taking another wife was a sign of charity and good will. Especially if that wife was the widow of a relative.
Now our world is experiencing something entirely new, in some parts of the world, for the first time in human history there are more men than women (india and china as examples) which is going to cause a lot of interesting events in the future.
